•  SELLER IN THE SPOLIGHT: STUDY 'TIL YOU DROP!
  
•  SLIVERS FUTURES: WELFARE AND WORK
  
•  TIP: GO FOR DETAIL
  
•  CASE STUDY: STUFFING THE PACKS
  

That lifestyle was the reason his Mum was so excited when she saw a TV segment about Slivers. Ahmed explains: “I need to earn, Mum’s on benefits and without Slivers I’d be in even deeper debt”. But Ahmed [Bookings: 88, , Hours Sold: 541, Buyers: 17] has managed to fit Slivers working around all his commitments.

He’s worked for Councils, cinemas, newspaper distributors, the NHS and a Call Centre. When the races at Ascot were in full swing, Ahmed had a break from studying and spent a few days working on the catering. His best booking was a day helping local people through the archives at their Town Hall. His worst was early morning cleaning shifts. “Waking up is not my thing. But I’m glad I did the bookings. That moved me up the market and I’ve had fantastic assignments since then”.

At Slivers we know many of the people who most need Bits of Work are frightened to try them. Problem is, they’re on benefits and doing any work this week can make next week’s payments very uncertain. Because of this problem, we became founder members of the Create consortium. That’s a group of Third Sector bodies working to introduce the Community Allowance to the UK.

The C.A. is payment for local people who do local Bits of Work. If there’s an unemployed youth worker in the area, for example, why should the Council pay for one of a 9-5 staffer to come down from the Town Hall to organise a summer event? The case for this localised way of working is explained at http://www.communityallowance.org/

80 organisations have now publicly backed the call for a Community Allowance in the UK. Is it making headway with decision makers? “We’re talking to politicians” says Naomi Alexander, the administrator. “But I can’t go into details.”

 “This year’s conference was our biggest ever, double the delegates of last year’s” says Philippa. “We had over 400 delegate packs that needed to be assembled from a whole range of materials and every delegate had to have a badge relevant to the workshops they’d chosen”. In past years, Philippa and colleagues had dropped everything on the crucial last working day before the conference and done this work themselves.

But in 2008, Philippa’s Cambridge office was able to call on Slivers. Four workers spent a concentrated few hours getting everything together before the courier arrived to take it all to London for the event. “It’s a job that has to be done at the last minute” explains Philippa. “Until then we don’t know who all the delegates will be and we don’t have the materials we need.”  Once more, it was Slivers to the rescue!